The computer camp concept was pioneered in 1977 by Dr. Michael Zabinski, a physics and engineering professor at Connecticut’s Fairfield University. Zabinksi had received several federal grants to train teachers at the University to integrate computers into their classrooms, and wisely thought of merging summer camp and computer training to reach young people…
The possibility of recording a three-dimensional image for later reconstruction through a hologram was developed out of early progress in X-ray and electron microscopy—notably by Hungarian-born Dennis Gabor, who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics…
The development of the Telstar satellites marked the dawn of the era of worldwide satellite communications. Telstar 1, launched in July 1962, and Telstar 2, which came ten months later, were engineered by a team at Bell Labs headed by John R. Pierce…
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was instituted as a newsletter to circulate among the nuclear science community in the aftermath of World War II and the Manhattan Project as a service and a warning to the world about the weapons they had created and unleashed…
As worries about the possibility of nuclear war spiked in the early 1980s, anxiety and anger began to surface in many of the arts, including British punk music. Punk had been politicized since the movement’s inception and many of those involved were, initially at least, informed by the experience of the British art schools…
In the early days of 1981, a new toy made its way to the West over the Iron Curtain. A few years earlier, a Hungarian architecture professor named Ernő Rubik had developed a “Magic Cube” while tinkering with ways to express rotation in 3D space in a single object…
In the early 1970s, the Stanford Research Institute received funding and support from a number of sources (including the Central Intelligence Agency, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s Institute of Noetic Sciences, and est leader Werner Erhard) to look into psychic phenomena such as clairvoyance, ESP, and precognition…
Man, Myth & Magic, dubbed “the most unusual magazine ever published,” was the first mass market encyclopedia of the occult, published in the U.K. and Australia in 112 issues beginning in 1970…
This two-minute television spot from 1985 promoted the Time-Life book series The Vietnam Experience, which was released serially from 1981 to 1988, perfectly bookending the Reagan years. Each of the 25 volumes covered subtopics about the Vietnam War from the American perspective, from military tactics to culture clashes…
In the rapidly changing, highly prosperous world in which they found themselves after the Second World War, American parents began to seek more modern sources of information regarding the best way to rear their offspring…
